How Mishandled IT Incidents Spiral Out of Control

Downtime

Survey respondents said their organization experienced an average of 150 IT incidents within the last year, each taking an average of 2.25 hours to resolve.

Ineffective Means

78% of respondents said their organization still relies on manual phone calls to notify IT when an incident occurs, and just 16% are fully satisfied with their company's current notification/activation process for incident response.

Passive Approach

12% said their organization waits for customers or users to complain before notifying IT about an issue.

MIA

34% said it's challenging to find the right on-call person when an issue surfaces, and 93% said there are times when the person or team assigned to an incident does not respond.

Most Common Types of IT Incidents

Insecure State

One out of 10 survey respondents said their organization experienced a denial-of-service attack within the past year.

Unfortunate Outcomes, Part I

More than two out of five said their company encountered decreased customer satisfaction as a result of IT incidents, and one out of six said these incidents have caused their organizations to lose business.

Unfortunate Outcomes, Part II

64% said these incidents have caused personal stress or increased workloads.

Far-Flung

More than one-third said their IT incident response team members are located in multiple locations or time zones.

Most Likely Tech Employees to Participate in Large-Scale IT Incident Resolution

Organizations deal with literally hundreds of IT incidents every year, with each one consuming a considerable share of the tech department's time, according to a survey from Everbridge. The report, titled "Current Trends and Concerns in IT Communication," indicates that these incidents include hardware failure, app outages, data center outages/performance issues and lost connectivity. They can prove costly, with consequences such as increased stress, customer dissatisfaction and lost business. To address the issues, organizations must take a more proactive approach toward the detection, prevention and resolution of these problems. The vast majority of companies still rely on manual phone calls to notify IT when something is wrong, and a number of them still simply wait for customers or users to complain before notifying the tech department about an issue. Given this, it should come as no surprise that few organizations are fully satisfied with their notification and activation process for incident response. More than 200 individuals responsible for IT operations took part in the research.